In recent years, as distributed processing and open architectures have become more widely employed, it has become apparent that the idea of defining a point-to-point relationship can be overwhelming and nearly impossible. The Internet was designed to afford connectivity; the term “point of presence” was coined because everyone on the Internet is connected to everyone else.
The traditional cryptographic usage has been limited to point to point, box-to-box, and/or user-to-user implementations. In these scenarios, the basic elements of cryptography are the algorithm (the mathematical transposition or substitution of numbers in a defined manner); and the key management scheme, that is, the system by which keys are created, transported, used, tracked, and destroyed.
In the world of digital cryptography, there are not very many key management schemes from which to choose. The first modern scheme was based on private keys (symmetric), in which two or more participants share a single key. Several decades ago, a British mathematician discovered a prime number relationship that allowed the utilization of one number (key) to encrypt and another to decrypt (asymmetric). This key pair relationship is the basis for public/private-key cryptography.
However, key management schemes can suffer from a significant deficiency. The movement of cryptographic keys from sender to receiver can become exceedingly difficult when attempting to achieve a finer, more precise separation of information. Therefore, it would desirable to provide a more efficient key management scheme that still allows for data separation.
Further, in one-to-many information distribution environments, such as a server/client arrangement, implementing cryptographic security over such information can require that each of a myriad of nodes or end-users possesses the cryptographic means to independently access encrypted information. For example, numerous end-users can possess the same cryptographic means to independently access (or decrypt) encrypted data. However, this type of scheme suffers from at least one significant problem. As the number of end-users increases, the likelihood of unauthorized access to a single implementation of such cryptographic means also increases. And where such means includes all, or even most, of the pieces required to access encrypted data, wholesale compromise of the cryptographic scheme becomes easier. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide server-based cryptography so as to minimize such risk.